Today there is a ray of hope - literally a ray of sunshine. Early this morning  I saw people walking outside with umbrellas up, and the ground certainly looked wet. Any drizzle has probably stopped now, and I cans see some thinner areas of cloud. It still seems ages away, but maybe midday will see some sunny spells, and then 2 and 3pm will see full sunshine until the sun sets at 15:51 today. The sunshine will only raise the temperature up to 7° C, and while the sunshine will help, it was still feel very cold. Tomorrow it will be back to grey weather, but it could stay dry, and most incredible is that the afternoon temperature could rise to 11° C. In full sunshine that could feel OK in just a t-shirt, but I expect it will still feel very cool in the gloom.

  Yesterday had the potential to be quite a miserable day, and particularly so because I had to try to fast for most of the day. I, and I imagine I am not alone, find cold grey weather makes me feel hungry. I almost managed to fight it, and although I didn't do as well as intended, I did manage to achieve part good results.

  After writing my electronic diary, yesterday morning, it was still a bit earlier than most days, but it didn't inspire me to do anything more than to turn my usual rest afterwards up to "11". It was probably close to midday, possibly later, when I resolved to finish the job of washing a small hand towel that had been soaking since the day before. It was only soaking because I couldn't seem to find the enthusiasm to finish the job, or maybe I just didn't seem find the time. It was not because there was anything on the towel that needed special soaking.

  As I moan every time, washing towels always needed a lot of rinses, and that small hand towel needed more than 12 rinses. At the 12th rinse the water was still not clear of any soap bubbles, but that is when I stopped, and hung up the towel to dry. That was actually the third stop. The second was after I had done about 6 rinses, and got bored. Maybe I was also starting to feel a bit tired of all the wringing out, but I stopped before I felt too tired.

  I came back to the towel maybe half an hour, or perhaps an hour later - I wasn't really bothering to keep track of time. After resuming I did 6 more rinses and wringing out - the last using double extra effort. I hung it on the small clothes horse in the dining room. With hindsight it was a bit of a waste of electricity, but I had the fan heater on low hours before it was needed to help dry the towel, in anticipation of getting the job done hours earlier.

  I think it was after hanging up the towel to dry that I gave in to some mild hunger pains....and probably some boredom pains as well. What I ate was far from good form me in most ways, but I believe the sugar content of even half a big packet of (alleged) KFC flavour crisps is quite low, although the calorific content is quite high....at least I assume it is (or was).

  Eating those crisp did seem to put me in the right mood, or whatever, to undertake a task that is always a bit scary, and this time, for a time, was definitely scary. One of the items in my recent order from Amazon was a new 2TB solid state hard drive. This one at least had a recognisable makers name - Integral - and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will prove more reliable than the Fanxiang (Who ???) solid state drive I had in my PC.

 I had already done a complete back up to the new solid state drive of my /home drive the day before yesterday. Yesterday I shut all the running programmes down and did the backup again. This time, with everything that was static already on the drive, the full backup only took a few minutes instead of about 12 hours or more. It was then time to open up my PC, unplug the temporary "spinning rust" drive, and replace it with the new solid state drive.

  I turned the PC back on and it failed to boot up properly. The real problem is that I had failed to call the new drive "home". If I had done so the operating system would have found it, edited the files table (fstab), and like when I put in the old, failed, solid state drive there would have been a long pause while it thought about it, and then fully booted as if nothing had changed.

  What I had to do was to boot the PC from a live Linux version of the operating system on a DVD. That allowed me to do two things, and probably just the first would have been enough. I checked the new drive on the disk partitioning software, and labelled it as /home. I then edited the fstab file to show the new Solid State Drive electronic identification. I think that the operating system would have done that by itself after changing the disks name, but I did it anyway - a sort of belt and braces thing.

  I then rebooted the computer, and that was still a quite short pause, while it did something, before booting up as if it had just been switched off before hand. Everything worked exactly as it had done before, and after setting the configuration for Waterfox (based on Firefox, but with a nicer interface) to resume using the last pages open on different tabs, it came up with all the tabs I had open before shutting it down. It was all rather pleasing, but still worrying before it was pleasing !

  The PC was ready to use just before 5pm, and when the Legend Channel would usually be showing old episodes of the original Star Trek, but apparently not yesterday. Maybe they feel they have shown enough. I did notice that Sky Mix were showing an episode of Star Trek: The New Generation at 4pm. I was not previously aware they did that, but it was too late to see any more than about the closing credits, and so I didn't bother.

  I had a two part dinner last night. Part one I had intended to eat while watching Star Trek soon after 5pm, but there was none, but I still ate dinner part one around 5pm. It was just a single wholemeal bap with corned beef, with tomato and sliced pickled gherkin. It was good, and I was very tempted to make another with my last bap, but I managed to resist the temptation.

  Part 2 of my dinner was originally going to a can or two of soup, but something made me change my mind. I ended up having seafood flavour instant noodles. I don't think I have had that flavour from that maker before. Much of the "seafood" taste was from seaweed. I guess it was nice, but maybe not enough to make me want to buy more in the future. I did have a part 3 dinner - I guess it was a dessert of one small little low calorie, and very slightly low sugar mint flavoured chocolate and nougat-like filling. I also had a small bar of 85% dark chocolate. The mint flavour bar was a bit stupid, but I mostly got away with it.

  There was some good stuff on TV last night. It was two videos of The Electric Light Orchestra. The first was a video version of their album called "Discovery". To my great surprise, I think Sky Arts didn't cut it down, but they did interrupt it for a load of adverts. The second thing was a sort of best of recordings of three ELO concerts. I didn't watch all I heard of it, but even with visual interludes, like checking things on the internet, it started to get boring.

  Not only did it start to get boring, but I was also starting to feel sleepy. My dinner didn't give any indigestion problems, and after turning out the light sometime not long after 9pm, I was fast asleep. Prior to turning out the light I was reading the Harry Harrison book "Spaceship Medic". Like any "space opera" it features a series of calamities. The ship was holed by a meteorite, and most of the crew killed. It turned out that the ships doctor, who was fresh out of medical school, had the highest rank, and despite it really only being an honorary rank, it made him the captain.

  The next thing was that there was a solar flare, and everybody, including over 100 passengers, have to move to the best shielded part of the ship to escape radiation from the flare. Everybody except the doctor/captain who volunteers to wear a spacesuit in a washroom that is flooded with water - water also being good protection from the radiation from the flare. Inside the washroom is some hastily wired navigation controls so the the doctor/captain can keep the ship pointed in the right direction to keep the oncoming solar flare behind the ship to provide the best shielding.

  Last night I got as far as the doctor/captain just passing out as the oxygen in the spacesuit has run out. On that cliffhanger I turned out the light and very quickly fell asleep. I was not worried because in stories like this the hero has to survive, and anyway, I have read the book before (even if I can hardly remember a thing about it. I am wondering if maybe I could remember more about it in my dreams, and I did dream about it.

  In the dream I seemed to be thinking if there was any mention of  Cherenkov radiation. It is a feint blue glow when atomic particles, moving at the speed of light, have to slow down when they enter something like water where the speed of light is slower. They give up their extra energy as visible light. The doctor/captain should have seen a blue glow in the water he was in as ,what would be a fatal dose of, radiation from the flare was attenuated by the water. Maybe the book does mention it, or maybe it was just my brain correcting what may have been a forgotten effect by a write who strives to be as scientific as possible.

  I did have another good dream during what turned out to be a very pleasant sleep, but during using four paragraphs to describe one dream, I seem to have forgotten that dream (although I think I was sure I remembered it before I started describing the first. One thing I think I still remember is that it seemed like I didn't wake up to pee as much as usual. That could, and in this case it did indicate my blood glucose had dropped from the dangerous levels of yesterday morning.

  There was also other good news after getting up. When I weighed myself I found I had lost the terrible 500gm I seemed to have put on the previous morning. All I have to do is to get rid the the 500gm, or whatever it was, the day before that. Yesterday I seemed to go for a poo at least 6 times though the day, and only the last seemed semi trivial. I certainly can't remember doing it, but I must have eaten about three times as much as I thought I ate the day before yesterday.

  It seemed no surprise that I didn't need to poo this morning....although, there were hints that maybe I might. In fact, after my breakfast, when weighing myself again would be pointless, I have been for a poo three times in quick succession. The last time was not very much, but even so, where is it all coming from ????

  I was very happy to see that my blood glucose readings have returned to their slightly higher than desired, but still very normal level. The Contour meter and the Sinocare meters both read 8.6mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter read 8.7mmol/l. So nothing to worry about there except it would be preferable if all those numbers started with a 7 instead of an 8. In a similar way, my blood pressure is a tiny bit higher than my average, but 111/49 is still very good.

  I am happy to say that the sky has cleared faster than expected, and I am now enjoying a sunny spell. Maybe a long sunny spell, or maybe it is actually sunny now. I can see a lot of blue sky, and it may be that the sun won't go behind a cloud (for more than a latter of seconds - which don't count) for ages to come.

  The next thing I am going to do is to have a lie down, and read how the doctor/captain is once he is rescued from the flooded washroom now the solar flare is over. Once I have read that chapter, and maybe the next one, I want to do some face maintenance. I have charged up my beard trimmer, and fitted it with the lowest cut possible (about 1mm), I will then wet shave off the areas that are supposed to be clean shaven. I'll follow that with shampoo and conditioner on my hair, and finally a shower.

  I will then be fit for company, although the chances of seeing anyone except a shop assistant is vanishingly rare. I definitely want to go out in the sunshine, and at a minimum I will go to see if there is any sign of the the London & Rye pub reopening by it's new owners. If I do that then I will also pop into the Poundshop to see if they have any zero sugar biscuits. No doubt I'll find other stuff to buy as well.